Rakugo Humor: The Performance of Memory, Mime & Mockery in Urban Tokyo

This dissertation is based on the analysis of humor in rakugo, a traditional genre of comedic storytelling in Japan. This project tackles the question: How does highly structured rakugo humor contribute and shape the Japanese society’s perceptions of the city of Tokyo in an age where the major social trends are dominated with a highly mediated and digitized lifestyle. In analyzing humor in rakugo, I argue that the farcical encounters, by refracting certain domains of human experience that cannot be articulated otherwise, provide a spectacle through which to view the deeper nuances in the sociocultural panorama of city life in Tokyo on the scale of individual interactions, institutions and neighborhoods. Rakugo and its mode of oral storytelling plays on the intricate discursive dynamics, by means of which tradition and modernity are imagined, represented, and the relationship between them negotiated. Additionally, the performance of rakugo, which has a long history that goes back to Early Modern Japan, triggers an affective imagination of the neighborhood life of the city’s past, where such imagination influences the Japanese society’s perception of the present. Rakugo’s popularity in the twenty first century is, in part, a result of the ideology of the Japanese state, on the other hand, it is mostly due to the power of the humorous folk narratives and mindfulness of the performers that the genre maintains a sense of coherence and agility, and urges the audience to embrace the patterns and lifestyle of the past, while remaining tuned with the prevailing trends of ambiguity and conspiracy in the aftermath of the recent triple disaster. My dissertation consists of eight chapters: After providing introductory statements and questions regarding the importance of humor in generating an analytical view of the Japanese society, in the first chapter, I map out the layers of memory and imagination transmitted through the story-telling voice and embodiment in a rakugo performance. The oral storytelling of rakugo activates an auditory perception of the neighborhood life of Tokyo that is characterized by simple, informal conversations and playful interactions, where such ease of direct interactions leads to a construction of the ancient neighborhoods as a sanctuary from the hyper mediated matrix-like lifestyle of contemporary Tokyo. Rakugo’s parodic tone gives the impression that, although times might change, human situations do not. Hence the humorous content of rakugo helps maintaining a sense of continuity within the rapidly changing trends of urban life. On March 11 2011, my fieldwork was interrupted with a big earthquake, which was followed with a tsunami hitting the Fukushima Nuclear Power Plant. Therefore, the second chapter questions the limits and possibility of humor and the rakugo performers’ reactions in a time of ambiguity and conspiracy in the aftermath of Japan’s recent triple disaster. While exploring the contemporary interpretations of ghost stories (kaidan banashi) and gallows humor, this chapter focuses on the binary tensions between the causes of fear and its humorous modification, and gets tied-up to the contemporary society’s fear and anxiety toward technology and the humorous interpretation of such fear in rakugo. The third chapter focuses on the changing notions of fame and stardom by comparing the generation of the legendary performers with contemporary ones in the light of the changing rhythms of urban life, which has an impact on the production of humor on the contemporary rakugo stage. The fourth chapter has an analytical perspective on the rakugo audience as fans and patrons, while engaging in the discussion of connoisseurship in relation to iki and tsū, (indicating stylishness and expertise, respectively). The fifth chapter focuses on the portrayals of foolishness while providing an analysis of mockery of the scholastic knowledge of modernity in rakugo stories. This chapter provides an analysis of Japanese modernity through the humorous perspective and mockery of the Edo commoners, their masterful use of the nonsensical logic, and the way such perspective is interpreted by the contemporary rakugo performers. The sixth and final chapter tackles the importance of voice projection in the performance of rakugo. While problematizing the so-called incompetence of female voice, as an accepted norm by the majority of the community of rakugo performers, this chapter also problematizes the issue of voicing culture and tradition. Anthropolog